Amazon Affiliate Marketing

You must have heard so much exaggeration about how much money you can make doing affiliate marketing. Or, might have set up a site with the aim of making money from affiliate marketing and might have spent money buying a domain, paid for hosting, employed the services of a web designer to design your site only to find out the money made isn’t enough to cover your capital. Well, maybe you haven’t tried the right affiliate program. There’s a way to make money from the affiliate marketing Amazon program. Yes, Amazon affiliate marketing which is known as the Amazon Associates program. Before we talk about how you can make money from this Amazon affiliate marketing program, we will take a look at its brief history.

Amazon Associates Program (Source: Whats-online.info)

What is the Amazon Associates program all about?

Amazon Associates is one of the first set of affiliate marketing programs which was launched in 1996. This program has a track record of over 12 years of developing solutions for helping website owners, developers and sellers on Amazon make money by advertising tons of used and new products from amazon.com and its subsidiaries like SmallParts.com and Endless.com. Bloggers and website owners that are associates create links for customers to click on to enable them to earn referral fees. The Amazon Affiliate program is free to join and very easy to use!

You can earn up to 10% referral fees if you provide customers the confidence of purchasing product via a referral link to a trusted site of yours and when they make the purchase, you get your commission.

Another cool side is that you get up to 15% referral fee if you are promoting certain products like gadgets. What you need to do basically is to write a review on the gadget and provide an Amazon affiliate marketing link. Anyone who clicks on this link and purchases the item would automatically earn you your commission.

Your geographical location is also a determining factor for your target market. For instance, if you are in the U.S., then automatically your target audience would be the U.S. market and you should sign up for the US Amazon associate program. On the other hand, if you are in India, you would want to sign up for Amazon affiliate India.

How to make Money from Amazon Affiliate Marketing

There are various things that you need to do and know if you are serious about making money from Amazon Affiliate Marketing.

Amazon Associates (Source: Digital Kalyan)

Below, we shall look at how to beat the odds in Amazon Affiliate program and how you can increase your sales after making money:

1.) Learn some basic HTML of you have no knowledge about it

To reduce your costs, you need to learn some basic HTML. It doesn’t matter if the site is basically laid down for you, it is important to know how images are inserted, creating of hyperlinks and some text formatting.

2.) Choose your topic

Since you are going to do a lot of product reviews and recommendations, you are going to have to pick a topic that you have the passion for or something you have a wide knowledge of. If your passion is not within that topic, then you are likely to lose interest eventually. Therefore, it is pertinent to choose something of your interest.

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3.) Pick a domain name

It doesn’t really have to be clever but keyword rich. Take time to think of how people will find your website. You should think of a suitable name that people would search for in the search engines.

4.) Register the domain name you pick

If you aren’t technically inclined, you can register your domain name at the same site you set up your hosting to make it easier for you. However, if you want to save some money, you can choose a lower-cost provider. This shouldn’t be a big deal using one or two sites but might be a big deal for up to ten or twenty. Domain companies like GoDaddy.com have great domain management tools are very affordable charging less than $10 yearly.

5.) Set up web hosting for your site

This is the part where people make mistakes the most. You don’t need to spend up to $10 per month for web hosting. There are companies that charge as low as $4 per month with unlimited domains which mean you can run more than one sites in this same package.

6.) Install a blog software

Amazon Associates (Source: TheGuideX)

This gives your site the structure it needs and makes it easy for posting new content. WordPress is the best option because it is easy to install and use, it is an open source and very powerful. All you need to do is download it and follow what is said in the instructions.

7.) Make it look good

This is one thing that makes WordPress stand out from the rest. There are various templates available that could give your blog/site a unique look.

8.) Set categories up

You are allowed to create sub-categories on most blog software so you can organize your entries. Visitors use this to narrow down their search on their interests.

9.) Go to Amazon.com and sign up as an associate

There’s no difficulty in in getting started with Amazon Affiliate Marketing. All you need to do is go to amazon.com and click on the Join Associates button and the page’s bottom. By now, your site should have been set up at the basic stage, at least even if there is no content yet because they will manually review the site before it gets approved.

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Date: 21st Mar, 2018 (Wed)Time: 3 PM to 4:30 PM (IST/GMT +5:30)

10.) Create blog posting links/bookmarks

There are two important links you need to make it easy. The first is the blog posting link which is at the bottom of the posting page of the blog software written as “bookmarklet”. Click on the link while holding down the mouse and drag it up to your Links toolbar on the browser you are using. This makes it possible to use a mouse click to blog a product.

11.) Create the Amazon Build-a-Link bookmark/link

This makes it easy to build the link with affiliate ID built in. You need to log in to Associates Central and on the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-link, and below Static Links, look for Individual Items. Click on this link and drag it onto your Favorites menu or Links toolbar.

12.) Build your first link

Build your Amazon Widgets (Source: ProBlogger)

Log in to your Amazon Associates accounts and look for the product you intend to review then use Site Stripe (that is the gray stripe at the top of the screen you see when you log in) to get your personalized link to the item. There are also a wide variety of options for creating banners and links.

13.) Blog your review

Once you are done writing your review, the next thing is to post it live by clicking on your blog posting the link (on WordPress you will see it as the Press It! Icon). You will see two pieces of link code on the posting form if it is WordPress you are using. The first one ends with “Associates Build-A-Link></a>”. Delete all through that point. The other part is a link to the product having your Amazon Associate built in. So, go ahead and write your product review, select the most appropriate categories for it then click on Publish.

14.) Build out your site

Before promoting your site, you would want to make sure there is a good amount of content there. You need to write several product reviews with 2-3 in each category created. You might also need to make categories for news, articles, commentary and others about the topic. The more the content on your site, the better. The amazing thing about all this is that as you writing all this, the search engines automatically are getting notified, if you turned the notifications on, mentioned earlier.

15.) Promote your site

Amazon.com and WordPress

The most efficient free way to go about this is to let other bloggers who write similar topics know about yours, and you can also participate in online communities and discussion forums where you can discuss your topic with other people.

Useful Tips to Get You Started

It is important for you to learn some basic HTML as well as basic concepts pertaining to running a website. It’s not really tedious to understand and within a short period, you will have a grasp of it. Relying on purchased software might backfire because it might not give you what you really need and when things go wrong you will end up spending more than you ought to. Take time to learn these things and you won’t regret it.

If you are a music lover, it would be a good idea to promote it over books and even other products. All you need to do is listen to clips of a full album within a short period, say 10 minutes, get a good feel of it without you purchasing it and do a short review. If there is another niche you are passionate about, make sure you get a unique discovery about it. Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of reviews about these products all over the web but you need to make yours more unique to attract people to your site.

If you want to make even more money, sign up for Google AdSense. Although, it might not make too much income but it’s worth it since it is free to sign up and doesn’t require anything to maintain.

Set good expectations for your earnings. Since you must have invested $20 and you are going to make 5% per product, it means you need to sell $400 worth of products to make your investment back. If you want to make $20 per hour, what you write on must generate $400 worth of product purchased.

How to increase sales in Amazon Affiliate Marketing

(1.) Post links regularly to optimize your earnings

This requires you to discover creative ways you can incorporate product recommendations into your posts on your blog while still creating the impression that you are offering your readers expertise on the subject.

It should be noted that the links to the affiliate program Amazon provides are active for 24 hours after it is clicked by a potential buyer meaning that they expire after 24 hours with fresh links providing the opportunity to earn money.

(2.) Build links for several kinds of products over time

You get paid an advertising fee by Amazon on the whole purchase made and not just the product advertised. This means you need to make sure people use their link on Amazon so they can make the full purchase they wanted to make using your referral link.

(3.) You can use your referral link to send information via email or to family members

You earn commission on anybody’s purchase, except yours, if they use your referral link within 24 hours. One tip here is that you can trade referral links with family members and friends and use their link to make your own purchases and ask them to do the same so there can be sharing of the spoils. This might not be the major way to make money in the affiliate program Amazon runs, but it can help your commission structure.

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Date: 21st Mar, 2018 (Wed)Time: 3 PM to 4:30 PM (IST/GMT +5:30)

(4.) Add widgets to your site

There are widgets and online stores of the Amazon Associates program that can be added to your website templates. Make sure you list various recommended products in your sidebar.

(5.) Promote products worth $100 and above

Products that are higher in price would give you a higher commission. Therefore make sure you recommend such products.

(6.) Use lists

Make a recommendation list monthly on a new topic because they are valuable to your readers and potential customers.

(7.) Use Amazon Associate links to post seasonal content

Obviously, around Christmas period, people tend to buy more, therefore, post recommended products before this period to take advantage of sales that will go on on Amazon affiliate marketing. It is better to start creating a seasonal schedule for your blog posts early enough. There are several holidays, so you can plan ahead of them to make more sales and earn your commission.

(8.) Optimize your website or blog

Run an SEO analysis on your site to know what adjustments to make in order to improve its coverage.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing is a very good way to make money if you are serious about it. With the necessary knowledge, skills, dedication and right attitude, you are bound to make such money in no time!

By education, a B Tech graduate and MBA from IIM Lucnknow. Deepesh’s journey from an engineer to a Digital Marketing has been exciting. He started his career as an Entreprenuer, founded editings.in. Now with 7+ years of experience into Digital Marketing, currently Deepesh leads Digital Marketing for Digital Vidya, having expertise into the areas of:
– Digital Marketing strategy & implementation
– Lead Generation, Improving Sales Processes & hence ROI for the organization
– Plan, coordinate and run digital marketing campaigns through analytical decisions
– Lead Generation & Customer Acquisition

You can sign up for Amazon Affiliate Program where you would be getting your unique tracking id which you can add on any product of Amazon & promote those products with your tracking id. Any user who purchases the product with your tracking code will help you to generate commissions.

Any user buying your product or even clicks that particular product with your tracking id will be visible in your Amazon Affiliate dashboard.